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Your Convictions or Your Livelihood??

Background: In January, the Obama Administration issued a “rule” under ObamaCare that requires ALL employers to provide FREE abortion drugs, contraceptives & sterilizations in their health plans. regardless of any ethical, moral, or religious concerns from the employer.

The HHS mandate does have a few**religious exemptions, including some organizations whose plans are grandfathered. However, in his great mercy, Obama has allowed those faith-based organizations that are NOT exempt until August of 2013 to comply.

For secular businesses, the HHS Mandate took effect yesterday, August 1, 2012.

This week, the thread of religious liberty that was so delicately woven into the very fabric of our nation has begun unraveling. Not because it was antiquated & was beginning to fall apart…

No, the unraveling began as a small band of elitist, liberal progressives have snipped, attacked, stomped, and thrown around what millions of Americans hold very dear—the First Amendment. The Obama Administration’s attack on religious liberty is in full effect as hundreds of thousands of Americans are forced to comply with regulations that deny them their deeply-held moral and religious beliefs through the abhorrent rule set forth by the Obama Regime, known the HHS mandate.

What I find most perplexing is that 190 million** health care participants and beneficiaries are supposedly exempt; however, many ministries of institutions like Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities who educate, care for the sick, & feed the hungry, are not “religious” enough to qualify for the Mandate’s “Religious Exemption.” Just who, exactly, is exempt because of their religious beliefs?!

And, please tell me how in the world a woman is being denied the right to healthcare just because her employer refuses to pay for her to kill her baby?

Sidenote: Healthcare, as defined by the ever-trusted Wikipedia, is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. I’m sorry, but when did a baby become a disease? Illness? Injury? Or impairment?!

Though our future looks bleak, as this Administration continues to trample on the rights of every American, I write with good newsthat you most likely aren’t seeing in the mainstream media.

A U.S. District Court in Colorado has offered Americans a glimmer of hope through a Preliminary Injunction issued in a case involving a privately owned HVAC manufacturer and distributor in Colorado, Hercules Industries, Inc.

Hercules is a for-profit, secular employer, but the owners, the Newlands, adhere to the Catholic denomination of the Christian faith. Subject to the August 1 date, the Newlands faced forfeiting their conscience or subjecting themselves to crippling fines by the U.S. government.

Andy Newland, Vice President of Hercules, said, “We never imagined the federal government would order our family business to provide insurance for drugs we object to covering… [The Mandate] seems so contradictory to [our Founders’] intention that Americans be free to live out their beliefs in a country created for freedom from religious persecution.”

Hercules even went so far as to amend the articles of their corporation stating that the business’ primary purposes are to be achieved by “following appropriate religious, ethical, or moral standards,” and by allowing its Board of Directors to prioritize those “religious, ethical or moral standards” at the expense of profitability.

Even then, they still did not fall under the government-defined criteria that would allow them to be exempt.

Shockingly, the Government argued that the Newlands forfeited their Constitutional rights to conscience when they started their family business. Are they serious?

Thank God the court did not accept this repugnant argument, and instead held that the government failed to show how exempting the Newlands would somehow prevent their objective of providing “health care.”

The Court also noted that preventing the government from enforcing its regulation “pales in comparison to the possible infringement upon [Hercules’] constitutional and statutory rights.”

Interestingly enough, yesterday, on the very day that the U.S. government robbed millions of Americans of their right of conscience, the State Department issued their annual International Religious Freedom Report for 2011 declaring that, “too many people live under governments that abuse or restrict freedom of religion.”